Court documents approved for release in the lead-up to a massive Justice Department watchdog report on the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email account offer fodder for both critics and defenders of the bureau's work.

The newly unsealed court filings, obtained by POLITICO, may well serve as a Rorschach test about the Clinton email probe. They demonstrate that the FBI's investigation did not rely solely on the voluntary cooperation of those involved, since agents and prosecutors used a combination of search warrants and other court orders to gain evidence relevant to the probe.

At the same time, the records do not contradict complaints by Republicans that the FBI did not use grand jury subpoenas to demand testimony from top Clinton aides, obtain search warrants to gain access to laptops Clintons' lawyers used to review her emails, or seek the personal phones and similar devices used by her top aides.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz sought unsealing of the records in May, in order to allow him to publish some details from the filings in his report released in June on alleged misconduct at the FBI and Justice Department prior to the 2016 presidential election.

Nearly 100 pages of filings from federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, show how investigators used a very broad search warrant in September 2015 to gain access to the email account of top Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan. The FBI told a federal magistrate judge that a July 2009 email forwarded to Sullivan's personal Gmail account showed that "top secret" information, including records related to sensitive satellite imagery, likely resided on Google's servers.

arly 100 pages of filings from federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, show how investigators used a very broad search warrant in September 2015 to gain access to the email account of top Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan. The FBI told a federal magistrate judge that a July 2009 email forwarded to Sullivan's personal Gmail account showed that "top secret" information, including records related to sensitive satellite imagery, likely resided on Google's servers

There are a few things I want to make sure are correct,

Clinton did not violate law by using her own server. It had been recommended that, for public future records, the Gov email account be used

Clinton had been informed of the preference, but wanted to have these emails be on one address on one phone.

She should have carried a second phone and if so then the same emails that were later problematic would have been received to the .GOV account

Clinton's Private email address was not one to send Classified Documents to. In fact the SCIF system would not allow one to, it would have been flagged

Neither would have been the .GOV email address.

Classified emails must be on a different server and system, SCIF , regardless and it was a very inconvenient

The Classified emails on her server were not originated from her, but SENT to her

Most(how many?) of those Classified emails were not marked Classified at the time

It was common practice to remove the classified sections so that one could more easily discuss on non- SCIF

Regarding the "Deleted Emails

Clinton began to provide the emails off her server to the government records

Clinton's staff used algorithms to separate her personal emails from Government emails using search phrases and words

The ones that were considered not of concern for government records were then marked for Deletion

The same IT person that always did this was the person assigned this task

These emails were marked for and directed to be deleted by this IT person in DECEMBER

The Subpeona was not issued until March, approximately 3 months later

Unbeknownst to Clinton the IT person delayed deletion until about the time of the subpoena

He has testified this

Of those "deleted" emails, most had multiple recipients and therefore recovered from other sources

There were not Classified emails found among the "Deleted" emails

The Classified emails that were found originated from other departments like DHS, etc

they were classified not because of content but often because earlier in the thread they had Classified references that were 20 pages up from when Clinton was brought in to answer a question.

The Weiner emails

Clinton liked to read printed emails

Her assistant printed the emails

this part is a mess-the assistant put a thumb drive in weiner's laptop?

or not, somehow Clinton emails ended up on Weiners laptop

During the course of an investigation into Weiners wiener, FBI found these emails

The rest I am not clear on. It has been recent news, the FBI had not looked at the emails for a week or longer, The agents were upset, told Guiliani and Nunez of the Weiner laptop with Clinton emails and Comey then felt compelled to go public. They then scanned the emails and found nothing, and came public with that,

During all of this time, Redflags and an investigation had started on the Trump Campaign

Clinton never said she wanted to use her own server because of the inconvenience of having to use a different email account for classified information. Classified information within the government is not disseminated through normal everyday government email accounts anyway. There is a completely different, closed domain for classified email. That means she would have had three different systems to deal with - the classified system which is only available within SCIFs - and then a government email system for everyday non-classified communication and a personal email account for everyday personal things. She wanted to be able to have one account for the everyday government and personal communication. It was never about how inconvenient classified email is - it was the inconvenience of everyday emails being on two different accounts and one of those accounts. If you read the report the FBI initially put out (I did, all four of the rather lengthy documents, every word) you would see how utterly mundane were most of the normal work emails. Things like her asking her staff if they were working from the office today. I get it when people say that there is always the possibility of some discussion subsequently being classified, but when you see the fucken emails her and her staff sent to each other it's pretty doubtful that any of it was ever going to be classified. I don't think two years later the FBI is going to decide that whether one of her staff members worked from home or worked from the office is ever going to become classified.

Here is an actual example of what the FBI says is "about" classified subject matter.

Email sent to Clinton from a staffer:
Subject: Condolences
Body: You can send on <date> (I don't remember the exact date)

There were then 4 more emails sent back and forth. Clinton: Are you working from the office today? Response: Yes. Clinton: Does so and so know?
Response: No

That is example of FIVE emails in ONE thread that were deemed to be "about" classified subject matter. Why? Because this discussion had to do with a head of state that had passed away. Of course, investigators didn't know that from the email itself - so even they did not recognize this as having to do with anything classified. When staff were interviewed about emails they were asked what it was about. This email thread was about the head of state that had passed away. That country notified the USA and asked us to keep it under wraps because they were dealing with some internal concerns. They kept the fact that their leader had passed away as a state secret for about five days. As SOS it fell upon HRC to be the person to deliver the official condolences for the USA. So, because this email had to do with that particular condolence, the email thread was "about" a classified subject matter, even though the email itself doesn't give a clue as to what they are talking about. They could be talking about something purely personal as far as anyone "intercepting" the email would know. There is no giveaway at all. If a person was able to guess what they are talking about I would say it's because they already knew from some other source.

If you read the report you would know that all but three of the emails that were "classified" or "about classified subject matter" were very much like the example I gave. The three that were not like the one I gave above were sent by some agency and that agency did not recognize the symbol on some information they sent as a proper classification mark, which it was not. In those emails Clinton was not even on the email thread until the email was about 30 pages long, and she never even read all the way down to those initial pages because the discussion had completely morphed into some other discussion where she didn't need to read all thirty pages to understand why she was even sent the email in the first place.

"I know that human being and fish can coexist peacefully"
--- George W Bush

Yes, Thank you.
It is portrayed much differently, of course.
As to the rest, any comments?
I'll edit that post to reflect your comments. The tardis has made this relevant again. Any links t your fingertips would be appreciated.

Unfortunately the four documents that made up the very detailed FBI report were removed from the FBI website pretty much as soon as Trump was inaugurated. We wouldn't want the possibility of citizens being able to read the report for themselves, I guess. And, the laptop that I owned at the time I downloaded it crashed and nothing was able to be retrieved from the hard drive. That didn't happen until after Trump's inauguration. I went to the FBI site so I could download those documents again, but, alas, they are gone. They are replaced instead by literally dozens of .pdf documents that in no way, shape, or form, give the same information. They consist of largely redacted information that has no meaning to anyone except possibly someone who was involved with the investigation. You cannot glean anything about the investigation or it's conclusions from those documents that are now available. Unfortunately, I didn't save them to my cloud drive either. Going forward I started saving things like this in my cloud because I really am bummed that I don't have it anymore. If I did, I would put it somewhere where all of us could access it.

"I know that human being and fish can coexist peacefully"
--- George W Bush

Despite Comey Assurances, Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails Were Never Examined
By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations
August 23, 2018
When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton email investigation for a second time just days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress that his agency had “reviewed all of the communications” discovered on a personal laptop used by Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.
< SNIP LONG ARTICLE >

When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton email investigation for a second time just days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress that his agency had “reviewed all of the communications” discovered on a personal laptop used by Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.

At the time, many wondered how investigators managed over the course of one week to read the “hundreds of thousands” of emails residing on the machine, which had been a focus of a sex-crimes investigation of Weiner, a former Congressman.

Comey later told Congress that “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as “duplicates” of emails they’d previously seen. Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked “night after night after night” to scrutinize the remaining material.

But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.

Paul E. Sperry is an American conservative author and political commentator. He was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank.[1][2]

Journalism and political commentary
Sperry has previously been the Washington Bureau Chief at Investor's Business Daily and WorldNetDaily. He wrote articles critical of George W. Bush for his decision to initiate the 2003 invasion of Iraq, accusing Bush of lying about the motivation for the Iraq War.[3]

He wrote pieces in The Wall Street Journal and made regular appearances on Fox News and other media outlets. He currently regularly writes op-ed pieces for the New York Post.[4][5]

One of Sperry's opinion pieces was his analysis of the actions of the administration of former President Barack Obama during the 2016 presidential election. Sperry opined that the Obama team abused intelligence gathering abilities and violated privacy protections in an effort to hurt the candidacy of President Donald Trump.[6]

Author
In the wake of the Fort Hood Shooting, he gave an interview to Coast to Coast AM on November 7, 2009, about his co-authored book Muslim Mafia.[7] In 2011, he published "The Great American Bank Robbery", a book about how the government's attempt to increase minority home-ownership helped create the sub-prime housing crisis.